shotgun vernacular

Three Dimensional Tanx – Attack!

Lancaster’s very own garage-punks of psych appear to be kicking against the pricks. With so much smooth BJM influenced psych around at the moment, these lads are making their songs shorter and dissonant. Instead of the 8 minute jams preferred by their contemporaries, they’re moving towards sub 2 minute splurts of guttural energy. Hell, the fact that their second album is simply titled Attack! does offer something of a clue…

Even the aggravatingly cheap and nasty album art reinforces this move towards the artificial and the fractured. The Technicolor sci-fi of debut album Three Dimensional Tanx is gone, long gone.

But with spliced anarchy we also see increased humour. Half Man Half Biscuit would be proud of a song titled ‘Astral Plane Flight Attendant’. So even when Spacey and the boys are putting their bovver boots on, they still have the same impish smile. And a drummer who usually can’t keep his pants on.

The chaos starts with the amphetamine rush of ‘Motorbootin’, an earache inducing bashing of drums that gives way to Spacey at full pitch, spinning words a mile a minute, shooting straight on while the music roars behind him. He sings of dirty floors while his band writhe on one.